


Letters From Me To You

by Tasha Y (ProwlingThunder)



Series: Fractured [3]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Apartment sharing, Everybody Is Going Crazy, Gen, Magic Mirrors, Not Your Average Roommate, Splintered Universes, invisible people
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-26
Updated: 2016-06-26
Packaged: 2018-07-18 10:22:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7311127
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProwlingThunder/pseuds/Tasha%20Y
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And this is where Raven Crow's story truly starts, in the end.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Letters From Me To You

It happened like this: he was born, he lived, he died. That's the story of all men, in the end. Raven's no different. He was born, he lived, he'll die. But his story means more than that to him, because even though he'll die eventually, he's here now.

He's here, and he doesn't know who he is.

His name is Raven Crow: he works at a gym, he dates a woman named Chastity, he helps raise her son Mark.

Half his apartment is pink. The walls, the ceiling, the floor. The drapes. There are notebooks with doodled pink Pomeranians on the covers, drenched in glitter. The words inside are pink. Half the bathroom is pink; curtains, toiletries, the towels and washrags, of all things. Bright and fluffy cotton in the linen cabinet next to the black he knows are his.

As far as he can remember, all these things have always been there. Nastalia's things. Nastalia's clothes in a modest wooden dresser next to his own, pink gossamer curtains around a four-poster bed in black sheets, the huge mirror above the bed something neither of them are quite comfortable with but is there regardless.

It's only in that mirror that he really sees Nastalia in the flesh. She moves through the apartment like a ghost, invisible, intangible. Untouchable, except in the briefest of flickers.

He wasn't entirely sure he wasn't going mad. Heaven only knew what other explanations there were; crazy, or a ghost, or one fractured reality spilling in on another. He was a gym instructor, not a physics theorist. What did he know about alternate realities? Nothing. And a ghost didn't strictly explain what had possessed him, in the time before he could remember, to doll up half of his apartment. Crazy, then.

For some reason he had a standing pizza order on Friday nights. He doesn't even like pineapple.

Nastalia does.

He seriously considers going to see a therapist. Something prevents him from picking up the phone to do so, from finding out what's wrong with him.

It's Nastalia. For some reason, the other half of his psychotic break is freaking out. Probably for the same reason.

He spends weeks cooped up in the apartment, venturing out only when he had to, for work and groceries. He can feel her, in the quiet of the apartment, doing the same. He doesn't register her touching anything. But he'll go to the restroom once, come back later and find a pile of her laundry on the floor, a wet towel and the tub full of left-over suds from a bubble-bath, running down the drain. Or he'll go to do the dishes and find them already done, sitting in the dishwasher ready to be put away.

Hidden somewhere in the apartment, Nastalia has a make-up bag filled purely with clear nail-polish and chap-stick. Raven can't exactly figure out where it is, but it's somewhere. The location is less important than it's use, because occasionally he finds an open bottle of polish on the coffee table and he knows, instinctively, not to sit on the couch, that Nastalia's there, painting her nails.

It is slightly more distressing than he wants it to be, if only because when he crawls into bed at night, he can feel it dip under her weight, and when he looks up into the mirror, he can see her there, bright and wonderful and so very lost. They're closest there, and as long as he looks into the mirror, the spell is not broken; he can feel her against his skin, laying her head on his chest and crying. He can see her through the reflection. He can touch her.

He's crazy. That's the only explanation.

He goes out and buys a journal to write what he sees, and doesn't see. When he goes back to it on the second day, he finds that she's written after it, wondering her own curiosities, asking who he is, what he's doing in her apartment, if all the black decoration is his doing.

It is. It's his apartment. Who else would it belong to? No, really?

And this is where Raven Crow's story truly starts, in the end. The moment he starts signing his sentences with RC, and she and her bright, glittering pen sign back in NF, and he starts to talk to the ghost living in his apartment.


End file.
